December 29, 2012: Israel is placing more cameras (either fixed or in vehicles or aircraft) in areas where its forces confront angry, or armed, Palestinians. This is to get a video of what actually happened in situations where Palestinians get killed and then accuse the Israelis of war crimes. Often Israeli troops are being ambushed or otherwise on the defensive. No matter, if Palestinians get hurt the Palestinians have learned that the media is willing to believe some outrageous lies and blame everything on the Israelis. All these videos, aggressively distributed by the Israelis, are becoming a real problem for Palestinian propagandists.

For over a decade Israel and the Palestinians have been fighting an Information War over who is doing the most damage to each other’s civilians. Both sides take a markedly different approach to how they deal with documenting and publicizing casualties. The Israelis photograph and record any available data on anyone killed in areas they control. In addition, the Israeli press (which includes pro and anti-government outlets) scrutinizes the deaths for possible headlines. So the Israeli count of who died, and whether or not they were fighters or unarmed civilians, is generally considered accurate. The Palestinians, on the other hand, severely restrict media access to combat areas they control. The Israelis do this as well but not as consistently and persistently as the Palestinians.

Palestinians also play with the numbers and have even been caught staging funerals using "corpses" that were actually live people pretending to be dead and representing fake fatalities. In at least one case an Israeli UAV camera caught one of these phony funerals in which the corpse fell off the stretcher, got up, and got back under the shroud. The video of this went viral and from that the Israelis realized that they had lots of similar video evidence of Palestinian efforts to deceive the media. So now the Israelis are turning that around with energetic searches for such video or photographic evidence of Palestinian deceptions, and then getting that rebuttal out there in a big way.

This has hurt the Palestinians in other ways. The Palestinians will claim as high a number of dead Palestinians that they think they can get away with. In cases where a third party was able to double check, the Palestinians were found to be exaggerating the number of their dead by five to ten times. Now, after years of having their deceptions revealed, the exaggeration is a lot less. That is considered preferable to being shamed by another exaggerated count being exposed as a lie.